Electronic components using a ceramic material include capacitors, inductors, piezoelectric elements, varistors, thermistors, and the like.
Among these ceramic electronic components, multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCCs) have advantages such as a small size, high capacitance, easiness of mounting, and the like.
Multilayer ceramic capacitors are chip-shaped condensers mounted on circuit boards of various electronic products such as display devices (for example, liquid crystal displays (LCDs), plasma display panels (PDP), and the like), computers, personal digital assistants (PDA), mobile phones, and the like, to serve to be charged with electricity or discharge electricity.
Such a multilayer ceramic capacitor is manufactured by alternately stacking a plurality of dielectric layers and internal electrodes to form a multilayer body, sintering this multilayer body, and installing external electrodes. Generally, capacitance of the multilayer ceramic capacitor is determined according to the amount of stacked internal electrodes.
In order to mount the multilayer ceramic capacitor on a printed circuit board, a predetermined area is required.
In the case of mounting a plurality of multilayer ceramic capacitors having various electric properties on a single printed circuit board, a predetermined amount of space should be secured in order to properly operate each of the multilayer ceramic capacitors.
Recently, as electronic products have been miniaturized, microminiaturization and super high capacitance have been required in the multilayer ceramic capacitors used in electronic products.
However, when electronic products are slimmed and miniaturized, a space for mounting a multilayer ceramic capacitor therein is limited, so that product design may be problematic.
Therefore, in order to simultaneously mount a plurality of multilayer ceramic capacitors having various electric properties on a single printed circuit board, there are limitations in miniaturizing electronic products.